ON PIPELINE, OBAMA MAKES LIKE KEYSTONE COP

Does Barack Obama, like the last Democratic president, think he can talk his way out of any jam?

Given his speech last week on his energy policies, it sure seems that way.

The key backdrop to the speech is the “brown revolution” — the sharp gains in U.S. fossil-fuel production in recent years. This is primarily due to a newly refined drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, in which underground water cannons guided precisely by advanced sensors blast away rocks and allow access to previously unreachable natural gas and oil reserves. Virtually all of this boom has occurred on privately held lands in the Dakotas, Montana, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania — not public lands. But at least the president and his appointees in the Energy Department, Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency have not gotten in the way — disregarding environmentalists’ unsupported claims that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is dangerous.

Now Obama has a momentous decision to make on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would allow Canada to send its vast supplies of oil-like bitumen from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast while also linking U.S. oil fields in the Upper Midwest. His administration for months has dropped hints it was a done deal.

This has triggered a huge backlash among environmentalists who see their dream of a U.S. economy built on renewable energy fading away. The president responded last week by declaring he would only OK the pipeline if it did not “significantly” increase greenhouse gas emissions. He also said he would impose new restrictions on coal in an impassioned speech with long passages on the threat posed by climate change that could have been written by Al Gore.

This triggered elation among environmental activists and bitter complaints from pro-pipeline and coal-state lawmakers.

But Keystone builder TransCanada welcomed the announcement, aware that a State Department report already concludes the project would meet the greenhouse-gas standard. And Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz downplayed talk of phasing out coal and gave a hearty defense of fossil fuels — especially relatively clean natural gas, which has become cheap and plentiful due to fracking, and has helped put the administration on track to meeting its goal of cutting the 2005 level of greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent by 2020.

Who should be elated? It looks to us like the reasonable people who think America should prudently take advantage of its still-immense natural resources — not the quasi-religious forces in our society who worship at the altar of renewable energy, no matter the cost.

If that’s the case, the president is going to have another deeply disappointed constituency on his hands to go with the disaffected liberals who expected him to be much better — or different, depending on your perspective — than George W. Bush on civil liberties. When Barack Obama’s words don’t square with his policies, eventually even his most ardent admirers notice.